


Bunk in the Red Part One

by dollarpound



Category: Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:07:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23620552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollarpound/pseuds/dollarpound
Summary: Regret for Rimmer was a dish he wished he'd known was best served cold





	Bunk in the Red Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Written two years ago, some bits have aged badly

Rimmer was reading The Birdman of Alcatraz when Lister clanked his way into the cell (the perimeter was actually secured by hololasers but they had clanking sound effects as part of the punishment) and jumping slobbily onto the top bunk greeted him thus:

‘Hi, Rimmer...’

Distant clank sound effects articulated the silence.

‘Hi, Lister,’ continued *Lister* doing that thing when people stage the conversation they think they deserve with themselves ‘What have you been up to? Oh I’ve got some good news actually. That’s good...’

‘Shutup!’ barked Rimmer suddenly. ‘Stop pretending to talk to me it’s really putting me off ignoring you... Dah! ...Reading my book...’

‘I’ve stopped you dah! reading your book? What is it dah!z Kapital?’

‘It’s called Lister is a Piece of Smeg.’

‘Charmin’. Let’s av a goosey..’ He hung down from the bunk annoyingly leeringly peering at the cover. ‘Very nice. Y’know we’ve got our own Birdman right here in the Brig....? That’s what they say... In the Hole, for maximum security, he was some kind of cult figure terrorist guy back in the day, thas what they say...’

‘Very interesting piece of *arcane* knowledge, now kindly let me get back to the *real* Birdman, the one from Alcatraz.’

‘He wasn’t real y’ doink,’ said Lister, settling back in his bunk.

‘He was, you ignoramus,’ protested Rimmer.

‘Birdman wasn’t real. Batman was real though, I mean he was a real fictional character, but Birdman was just a *fictional* fictional character, like the show within a show in Mugs Murphy.’

‘Not the Micheal Keaton movie you gimboid, the *real* Birdman. Have you been talking to that weird comic kid again?’

The weird young Arab guy had told Lister a bunch of weird smeg. About how the ship was doomed to being devoured by a corrosive micro-organism and that he had to remember Cesiumfrancolithicmyxialobidiumrixydixydoxidexidroxhide to combat it. For Lister this wasn’t hard, as he’d learnt Esperanto once just to annoy Rimmer and just had this knack for remembering stuff like that.

He told him the origin of the recurring dream he had been having where the Good Witch tells him not to turn away from love, Sailor! Don’t turn away, don’t turn away from love. It was from a Nicolas Cage movie called Wild at Heart. The weird kid knew all about Nicolas Cage movies and could do an amazing Nicolas Cage impression that left you fearing he might turn himself into a horse and eat himself.

He also told him that at some point in the future he would develop a drinking problem. Lister had the opposite of an addictive personality. That’s way he always cadged cigarettes – he wasn’t needy enough for the security of having his own pack. Sure he would do the same smeg over and over again but he didn’t *really* get addiction. There was that time that he dragged them back in time to the Kennedy assassination by accident because he wanted a curry so bad but this was more him going space crazy than anything else.

Anyway, the guy said he would have a drinking problem, and Kochanski would get annoyed with him, eventually giving up on him entirely and going off on her own in a Blue Midget, or at least that’s what Lister would think. But *actually* he had to remember that what *actually* happens is she gets sucked out of an airlock and dies. Lister came close to punching the guy when he said that. It was so personal. All this nutty stuff about Cesiumfrancolithicmyxialobidiumrixydixydoxidexidroxhide and Nicolas Cage and the next thing he’s talking about his Mum abandoning him for the second time or worse dying.

‘Let’s have that conversation that people are always going on about how they’re going to have... the one about race.’

‘Let’s not...’

‘C’mon, Rimms, we’re stuck in a prison in Deep Space...’

‘Stop saying that...’

‘Well we are, you know I’m not lying. Look, I know it’s freaky but you might as well start getting your bonce around it. Deep Space is just a prejudice y’know, I mean like the way Australia is on the bottom of the map... it’s not like it’s actually *down* or anything, or that space has an up or down or centre or edge...’

‘It’s about power you goit.’

‘Yeah well space doesn’t care about human power structures.’

‘And human power structures don’t care about the ramblings of some sham glam space bum.’

‘Yeah, but that’s not you is it? You don’t have to see the world from the perspective of everything that’s trying to crush you...’

‘Well I seemed to be doing prettyfinethankyouverymuch till you rocked up from some alternate dimension and got us sent down.’

‘I’m from *this* dimension smegger. Only reason you knows me is I must have become an important factor in your identity... the nanobots have made you remember me up to the point of the accident.’ 

‘Okay fine, let’s have the race talk, anything to stop you wittering on about stupid alternative dimensions...’

‘But you-! Nevermind. Look are you sure you can talk about all this squicky smeg no-one talks about?’ 

‘When I’m talking to you Lister, I feel like I can talk about anything, like nothing matters anymore...’

‘That’s kind of beautiful, guy...’

‘...because it doesn’t because you’re a smelly idiot that wrecks everything.’

‘So honestly, how do you feel about multi-culturalism for example?’

‘Okay, fine, we’re really doing this? You want to know about my honest feelings... and experiences... about race?’

‘Yeah.’

There was a deep long pause and the ship itself seemed to sigh as the clanking of a crane lifting a huge rock, both of which had materialised contemporaneously by itty witty teeny weeny nanobots, echoed around the Brigg.

‘Okay...’ said Rimmer, stealing himself. He decided to trust Lister... ‘What really smegs me off about GELFs is...’

‘Woah, time out, Arnmobile, I didn’t mean *that* kind of convo.’

‘But you haven’t even let me finish my sentence...’

‘What that rant was going to go on for two years?’ Two years with this racist ponce.

‘Thanks for reminding me.’ 

Lister remembered the time he inserted his memories of Lisa Yates into Rimmer’s holomemory. He felt guilty because it was dicey messing around with someone’s mind, especially someone whose mind was as messed up in the first place as AJR’s. But it also made him remember the sheer amount of *work* he’d done on this man, trying to help him, build him. He was back to square one.

‘I didn’t mean let’s have just a normal racist confab! I’m an enlightened 23rd century guy for smeg’s sake...’

‘So what are you saying, you like hanging out with GELFs?’

‘I wouldn’t marry one,’ lied Lister. ‘I’ve played cards with BEGGs before, they’re down to earth dudes...’

‘More like face to earth dudes...’

‘So they like eating garbage, what’s your problem?’ 

‘My problem is when I’m expected to acknowledge them as equals...’

‘You’re your own worst enemy Arnold. Hasn’t it occurred to you that all this hierarchy you grasp onto so tightly isn’t something that makes you look all that good?’

‘You mean that I’m a second tech.’

‘No I mean you clean gunk off chicken soup nozzles. You deal with garbage, and there’s nuthin wrong with that it’s honest work. Look at Kryten...’

‘I’d rather not. He looks like a talking blob of used bubble gum. Why does everyone respect him so much? Isn’t he just a cleaning machine?’

‘I don’t know about *everyone*... I mean they incarcerated him and put him in the Women’s Wing when he clearly identifies as a man...’

‘If he’s just a cleaning machine why’s he doing time at all?’

‘I dunno... bunk robbery? Killing germs? Vax evasion?’

‘That’s stretching it.’

‘Nah, that’s what they got the washing machine in cell 23 for. Either that or money laundering.’

‘Lister why are you being so “funny”?’

‘I don’t know it’s a pretty grim situation...’

‘Exactly.’

‘...so could do with some lightening up. Alright then I’ll be serious: How can you say Kryten’s just a cleaning machine?’

‘Because he is. He’s not even a he, it’s an it.’

‘How can you say that?’

‘It’s just a case of grammar.’

‘Yeah, Rimmer’s grim grammar.’

‘You just don’t understand class. Class is how you class things. Human. Bog-bot.’

‘No class is how you say “class”,’ he said so it rhymed with “farce” ‘and I say “class”,’ he said so it rhymed with “mass”.

‘Well we’re both prisoners now, the lowest of the low...’

‘Speak for yourself: some of us round here have got the self respect not to define themselves by their position in society.’

‘For respect read delusion.’

‘You’re such a buzz kill, Rimm-eh.’ For Rimm-eh there was no buzz to kill. They were in prison, that was pretty bad, wasn’t it? He was working for the ziggurat and ended up with the panopticon. For Lister, who had been medically diagnosed as severely space-crazy by the ship’s terrible mental health service, none of this was real really because despite the JMC mental health service being terrible, it was right in at least one of its diagnoses: Lister *was* severely smegging space-crazy. 

He’d been through more swirly things, wibbly things, worm holes, time holes, stasis leaks, dimensional linkways and magic doors than you could shake a cloche at. His grip on reality had paid for these endless layerings of alternate realities, time paradoxes and multiple-self experiences. Externally, he always projected a gregarious, confident demeanour but occasionally if you caught him in a drunken reflective mood you could clearly see that the guy was cracked in some unique way.

‘Why do you have to be so excruciatingly chipper all the time?’

‘Because I’m working class.’ But the real reason was, despite the guy being an absolute nobhead, Lister still had this butterflies in the stomach feeling just being around Rimmer again, yet tempered by the certain knowledge, being rammed into his ears every time he spoke, that this wasn’t him, this wasn’t the man who broke his heart, who he realised he was in love with just as he lost him, in some tragic necessary way, like if he hadn’t lost him he wouldn’t have loved him or something. This so wasn’t him. This guy was sort of oily and creepy and just so sort of immovable or something.

‘You know my Rimmer spent 600 years in jail.’

‘What a guy!’ said Rimmer sarcastically. Lister chuckled at the coincidence and stroked his stomach hairs thoughtfully – he’d discarded the dreadful mauve boiler suit. 

‘Andy add no-one to whine onto either.’

‘Is this supposed to make me feel *grateful*?’ Lister sighed with frustration. He was confused, what was the point, was he just being cruel?

‘What I’m saying *is*, he’s a hero... a proper one, not just some crypto-fascist git with all the right medals and badges and what do you call them pips... it’s not about pips Rimmer, like what you’re trying to be, like the reason you feel so blue about being in the slammer. It’s above all that.’ But Lister couldn’t explain, he’d seen all these extra dimensions to their situation and to him being in jail wasn’t something that had befallen him as part of some normal human biography –in which case it would always be a bad thing- but from the perspective of a cracked, compassionate Cat God who’d already helped Rimmer jailbreak twice.

‘In the future they’re going to invent something called a Justice Field where any criminal act you commit rebounds straight away on you – like cause and affect are wired up in some weird moralistic way or something, whilst you’re in the Justice Field.’

‘Fascinating!’ said Rimmer sarcastically. ‘When they do I’ll pray you punch me in the teeth and finally stop banging on.’

‘Shut-up. There’s a planet where time runs backwards and food like comes out of people’s faces and they put it back on their plate and then get paid for returning it to the shop.’

‘That’s what I do to get extra credits. They’re just saying they puked and returning the packaging to get their money back.’

‘Such a stinge. There’re things called psi-moons, right, which spontaneously terraform into some weird alien-like planet when they bond with a human psyche. Like you could have real lifeforms and geographical features, all based on like all the smegged up stuff going on in your mind like.’ Lister liked talking about the psi-moon because it made him think of Rimmer without his shirt on.

<~k

Rimmer, that is Lister’s Rimmer, ensconced in nano-perfect dimension-era space-flight seating, pecked noisily on his favourite brand of cigar, and he had a favourite brand of cigar now, while the interdimensional computer reconfigured itself. He needed a beat just to rest on his laurels, enjoy the inertia of the Wildfire as it glided seamlessly through the pristine heavens, the gloss of its vacuumshield shining with the airbrushed contours of a strawberry hued nebula. 

He arched his back like a Cat, and thought of his Cat, and all the Rimmers’ Cats, whose paths had continually criss-crossed pan-dimensional space in a cat’s cradle of cosmic coincidences, and looked down at his naked, entirely tattooed body. He’d learnt a lot about the Cats, and the Rimmers, Listers, Krytens and Kochanskis and the weird nature of interdimensional travel and the way it was framed by narrative and archetypes and a kind of moral compass (he shuddered at the thought) than any discernible scientific or technological principals.

‘Well, I seem to have reconfigured myself okay, how about you?’

‘I’m not sure whether to leave the tatts but I’m going to keep the clothes off for a bit, Compuder...’

‘You didn’t have the tatts before?’

‘No.’

‘Damn! This always happens. One sec.’ Rimmer put on some Hammond music and started to click along in a schmaltzy way.

‘How’s this dimension treating you, Snuffles?’ The cute GELF in the back squeaked back. ‘Don’t worry as soon as the onboard compuder’s loaded we’ll get you to the nearest medibay and you’ll be good as new before you can say “Smoke me a skipper”... I mean “Smote me a Lister”. The hologram’s voice had gone from warm and reassuring to distracted and agitated and the GELF began to cry.

‘Hi, Ace, I’m properly configured now...’

‘Compuder, plot a course for the nearest medical facility please.’

‘Oh, no problem, look right behind you.’ Ace spun the craft around.

‘Oh, baby!’ It was the first time he had seen it since leaving the planet of the Despair Squid with his original ship mates, all those years ago, before he was turned off for 200 years, imprisoned for 600 and trapped on Starbug where Ace died and bequeathed him that fateful wig. Red Dwarf.  
When Rimmer had first applied for his first space mission all those thousands of millennia ago, he had got into Red Dwarf through clearing. But the ship, space scarred and barnacled with meteors and interstellar flotsam, was also scarred and barnacled with millennia of meaning, such that it was now hard to see it as just a ship again. It wasn’t just a ship, it was home, it was everything. 

‘Compuder? Engage cloche.’ He shuddered and whispered gruffly ‘I’m home,’ as the Wildfire disappeared into the stars. ‘Compuder check the ship’s log for Messrs Lister and Rimmer, please.’

‘Dave Lister and Arnold Rimmer present.’

‘What about... Hollister!’

‘Captain Hollister present.’

’No smeg.’

‘Not a smegging smidgen.’

‘What about Todhunter?’

‘Todhunter present.’

‘Compuder can you remotely hack the ship’s hologram simulation suite? I want you to give me Todhunter’s body.’ Rimmer morphed into Todhunter within the invisible ship. ‘Thanks.’ He looked in the shaving mirror he kept in the glove compartment and was satisfied that this was it, what he’d found himself looking for – a dimension where he didn’t cause the Cadmium II leak that killed the crew and precipitated their incarceration in Deep Space. Then he couldn’t resist saying, as he looked into that handsomely bechinned poshboy’s face, ‘Oh, Boy!’

The computer had seen it all before and continually warned him of going down this path, but Rimmer wanted some proof that these catastrophic mistakes had been his making, that it was necessary somehow, to becoming Ace. Because redeeming his past was the only way he could see himself overcoming his bitterness for long enough to stop being an Ace hole, and start being an Ace, any Ace, an Ace of his own design, as Lister said. He sighed. Lister. ‘Be careful, Rimmer,’ said the computer. ‘Lister is far behind us now, this whole Ace thing, it’s not what it seems.’

The computer had this way of offering these zen riddles which somehow suggested the prestige of some mystical path that couldn’t be explained. It all made Rimmer agitated and reminded him of Ace and his smegging flying carpet. Just then he noticed a Starbug leave a set of cargo bay doors in one of Red Dwarf’s six sides. He swooped the Wildfire down masterfully, tailgating the Starbug without a scratch. ‘Cook me a tuna, computer, I’ll be back to eat it shortly.’

‘It’s *kippers*, for *breakfast*,’ she rebutted with irritation.

‘Whatever’s your *poisson*,’ he winked, because he winked now, and opened the hatch so he appeared mid-air in the cargo bay, had there been anyone there to see him. And had anyone been there to see him they would have seen him as Todhunter of course because that’s how he’d chosen to manifest the hard light bee Legion had given him. And anyone had been there to see him, and that anyone was Petersen.

‘Petersen!’ Rimmer liked being Todhunter. He had this hale and hearty clipped enthusiasm. A brusqueness. He was brusque as smeg. He could be as brusque as you liked actually. Just taking on someone’s physical appearance kind of lead you off in a certain way – just the way particular bodies operated had a predestined character to them to some extent. He had had some experience of this during his adventures.

‘What’s that?’

‘This is a GELF...’ He partially unswaddled the strange Cronenburg in his arms to which Petersen had been referring. ‘...pet.’ It was like nothing Petersen had ever seen before. That’s not true – it was like nothing Petersen had wished he’d ever seen before. There was just a whole lot of ... eww. ‘I need you to do me a favour... I need you to stand guard while I operate on this poor lifeform’s nasal cavity. It’s making it difficult for Snuffles to breath – hence the name.’

‘What are you going to call him when he’s fixed?’

‘Snuffles. Are you going to help me or what?’

There were emergency medibays right by the gantries leading to the cargo bay to help injured miners returning from expeditions. Rimmer snuck straight in and placed the GELF down on the medibed.

It wasn’t the first time he’d operated on a GELF but this operation was particularly tricky. As the sweat gathered on Todhunter’s borrowed brow, Rimmer heard footsteps coming down the corridor and doubled up that contradictory effort to relax called focusing.

‘Hi, Krissie, what’s up you look stressed?’ Rimmer could hear Petersen asking Kochanski just outside the door.

‘No. I’m fine,’ she said, sounding stressed. ‘Have you seen Dave?’

‘Dave? Who’s Dave?’

‘*You* know – Lister!’ said Kochanski.

‘Attaboy!’ said Rimmer under his breath as he sutured the GELFs nasal cavity. ‘Keep her talking, keep her talking...’

‘Oh, yeah, Dave Lister, don’t ask me, he doesn’t hang out with the boys from the Dwarf anymore...’

Rimmer carefully bandaged the GELF and put them in a medical waste shoot. This might not have seemed like the most compassionate move unless you knew the GELF was a BEGG and this was letting it return to its natural environment.

As he freed it he said ‘So long Snuffles, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, except eating a bunch of old syringes and unwanted organs that is and chuck me a flipper, I’ll be back for... more... flippers... smegging catchphrase...’ 

‘Todhunter!’

‘Kochanski!’

‘Tabee!’ said Petersen, which was Dutch for so long, making sure Ace caught a conspiratorial wink before he left.

‘How’s the old navigating going?’ asked Ace awkwardly.

‘Oh, you know, navigating this, navigating that, ducking and diving...’ She laughed nervously and blushed a little. She had a sheaf of papers and a takeout coffee.

‘Where...’ Oh God, this was terrible, ‘are we going next?’ Seriously??

‘Where’rewegoingnext,’ said Kochanski in a breathless panic. Then suddenly... ‘You don’t know?’

‘Of course!’ he said over zealously ‘...I know where we’re going next but I was just wondering which route you were thinking of taking.’ As he said this he tried to angle his head to see the papers she was carrying. ‘I see the new trajectory is hot off the press...’

‘Well when you’re choosing a route through empty space you can’t beat a straight line... Damn...’ She dropped the coffee and papers and bent down to pick them up. The coffee was miraculously intact but when Rimmer knelt down to help she seemed to almost deliberately knock it over, the pages drinking up the coffee and turning to mush.

‘Let me get you a replacement.’

‘You can’t it’s classified information.’

‘More like caffeinised information,’ he said, rolling a soggy pulpy ball and putting it in the coffee cup. He threw this into the medical waste disposal and said ‘There you go, Snuffles...’

A skutter had stopped to sponge the coffee puddle from the corridor and they both stood there awkwardly.

‘I meant the coffee.’

‘Oh.’

‘Shall we?’

‘Sure, wait, where’re you going? The coffee bar’s this way.’ Coffee bar? Ace had started for the cafeteria. Kochanski navigated them down the GDR glumness of the grey corridor. In that retro digital watch font composed of elongated hexagons, a wall display read 12 APRIL 2077 12:20. Three and weeks after the crew got wiped out in his timeline. They must have been on the verge of franchising the food service.

‘Wait, you were making for the cafeteria! Are you still going there? Cafeteria coffee’s homeopathically weak.’ The cafeteria had this post war holiday camp vibe. Mince. Treacle. 

‘I know, but in my line of work you have to keep it real, keep down with appearances,’ said Ace, catching up with the socioeconomic implications as the corridor populated and he had to physically catch up with her, people milling around.

‘Sure, sure, you just think I’m a cheap date – don’t worry it’s on me, you can look after the table’ she breezed, heading for the bar as Ace sat down outside. He was still getting used to these situations. He had spent so long on the Dwarf after the accident in his home dimension, he’d got used to the conversations and events of his life being foregrounded by nothing more than the benign hummings of the ship and its life support systems and the way their voices would just echo round this old tin can. But here, the Corridor G branch of Starbug’s, bodies and voices jostled, each taking itself to be the real story and yet aware of countless other stories being told, entwining and overlapping with their own. 

‘Usually when Dave’s mates complain that he hasn’t been hanging out with them it’s because of a certain Officer Kochanski. So what gives?’

‘You haven’t heard? What have you been living under a rock?’

‘Well, yeah, my quarters are under a rock.’ It was a bad turn of phrase for a mining ship.

‘Here comes someone who can answer your question.’ Strolling down the corridor towards them, with hair that had been allowed to frizz out into an Anglo version of an afro, wearing leggings and a big baggy jumper and smiling confidently was Arnold J Rimmer.

‘Hello, darling,’ said Kochanski as she and this dimension’s Rimmer kissed.

‘Kochanski, Todhunter...’ he genially acknowledged them as he sat. 

‘I haven’t seen you in ages, where have you been?’

‘Sorry,’ said Rimmer saucily, ‘I’ve been under Scouse arrest.’

‘Todhunter was just wondering why none of Lister’s coworkers see him out on the razz anymore...’

‘Oh, no-one asking after me then?’ said Hippy Rimmer, with mock-hurt. He laughed and said ‘Don’t worry I know no-one gives a smeg about me, I used to be such a smeg head before I got together with Dave...’ This hurt our Rimmer for real, because he was that Rimmer.

‘Aw, I give a smeg about you...’ said Kochanski brushing his wrist with her hand.

‘Wait, what, you mean, you’re with Lister?’ 

‘I thought everyone knew,’ said Hippy Rimmer.

‘People have been calling them Rimster, it’s the best portmanteau available.’ Ace ran through all the possible permutations... Darnold?

Ace had already seen some pretty twonked out smeg in his dimension jumping adventures, but he just couldn’t seem to compute the idea of getting together with Lister... it was just so weird. They weren’t gay. The dimensions he’d explored all hinged on some alternative decision he could have made in some other one. He hadn’t anticipated that this could actually affect outcome of sexualities.

Somehow, in this dimension, Lister wasn’t punished for bringing a cat on board and Rimmer hadn’t been short staffed the day he made the oversight that lead to the crew being wiped out with Cadmium II. What kind of decision did he make that made this difference and what was the connection for him and Lister being gay for each other in this dimension?

‘Ace Rimmer!’ shouted Chen from behind Ace. Ace turned, suddenly horrified as if suddenly naked or something.

‘That’s what Lister calls you now, right?’ he said, duffing Hippy Rimmer’s considerable shoulder with his fist and then staring at his open hand with mock pain. Chen had raised opprobrium and amusement in equal measure from the surrounding clientele.

‘What’s a matter – Chenvious?’ managed Hippy Rimmer. 

‘Er, no, I’m coming over tonight to give you both a good licking. Don’t you remember? You’s both been refusing so long to come out on the tiles that we agreed to bring the tiles to your quarters...’

‘Tonight?’ said Hippy Rimmer, slightly squeaking.

‘See yer at 8, Ace,’ winked Chen, giving him another mock punch to the shoulder and whistling off down the corridor.

‘Great,’ said Hippy Rimmer, hanging his head, ‘a night of laddish comradery with the usual brutal speculations about my love life thrown in. Can’t we get dinner instead?’

‘I can’t I’m...’

‘With... Smeg. It’s almost worth doing some work...’ Oh yeah, why was Rimmer in his civies? He should be working like everyone else. Hippy Rimmer’s look was the opposite to Normal Rimmer’s. Instead of going against the grain and gelling the smeg out of his hair to make it go straight and to the side, Hippy Rimmer went to the Warhol school of style, exaggerating those features that had held him back. His long thin legs made him fun to knock over in the schoolyard, so he proudly flaunted them instead of wearing those baggy combats pulled up over his hips. He let his thick hair explode outwards from his head, creating a zany halo. And a chunky textural jumper to emphasise the huggable hugeness of his chest.

Seeing as he appeared to be Red Dwarf’s HR officer, getting into character, Rimmer couldn’t resist asking ‘Yeah, why *don’t* you?’

Kochanski turned to him and asked ‘Is Hollister getting twitchy about it?’ Twitchy about what? Then, to Hippy Rimmer: ‘What are you going to say to the guys tonight when they ask why you’re not working?’

‘Shore leave?’ replied Hippy Rimmer.

‘On a ship?’ asked Kochanski.

‘An administrative error...’

‘Sounds unlikely...’ said Ace/Todhunter, feeling their reputation impugned. Kochanski started drawing little circles around his hand which rested on the hexagonal table.

‘Then so will any...’ The circling was driving him crazy ‘...marital errors... for now. Thanks for the coffee, but this ship won’t navigate itself...’ She suddenly seemed to click out of it, but then just as she was leaving, squeazed Ace’s shoulder and whispered sexily into his ear ‘Just stay away from my boys, okay.’

‘Hollister busting your balls about me and Lister skiving?’ asked Hippy Rimmer casually. Ace shook himself from his malaise and nodded vaguely.

‘Tell you what, I’ll meet you half way. Do the rounds in uniform in the morning, make tsking noises and tap my clipboard a bit.’

‘That’s nice of you to offer... why are you being so nice to me?’ Ace could remember Todhunter calling him a smeghead and ganging up with Lister.

‘I’m a nice guy. I’ve done a lot of work on myself.’

‘When?’

‘Since you’ve been signing us off work, we’ve been on a sabbatical, self improvement, that kind of thing.’

‘But I always called you a smeghead, ganged up against you with Lister...’

‘Yeah, but I was a smeghead...’

‘Were you though?’

‘Yes.’

‘How so?’

‘*You* know. By being such a jobsworth, by taking everything so seriously...’

‘But you’re supposed to take things seriously. We’re in space. We’re dealing with radioactive substances. The risks are huge, this whole ship could be wiped out tomorrow by one wonky drive plate for example...’

‘Really?!’ said Hippy Rimmer suddenly. ‘Yes! I suppose it could. In fact, hadn’t we better check the status of that? We should ask Holly.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll get on it, I don’t want to crimp your sabbatical or anything...’

For a while the two Rimmers drifted into the melee of voices surging like a tide over the pebbles of the soundtrack, a compilation entitled A Rough Guide to Kinitawowian Music. It was soothing to be contextualised by the soft kinetic murmur of humee society, which was the basis of the franchise – there was a coffee machine just down the hall but people needed this, none more than our Rimmer. Lost in the soft hubbub the two of them might have swapped souls without knowing it, or projected through countless dimensions.

But then our Rimmer noticed something, picked something out, and reality crystalized around this aspect, formatting the disordered synesthetic assemblages of smells, sounds and textures, the blooming, buzzing confusion of direct experience into something reckonable with. What he noticed was, down the corridor, by the aforementioned coffee machine, a certain Miss Kochanski, carrying a mint pressed copy of the ship’s route. Zoning in on the crisp pages made him remember himself, that he had unique abilities and responsibilities.

He felt tension leave Todhunter’s holohunched shoulders as he let any animosity towards hippy him drop and instead wanted to nonjudgementally figure him out, learn what it was he had to learn here and learn it. But he was also pretty interested in those papers Kochanski was carrying.

‘Why does Lister call you Ace Rimmer?’

‘He doesn’t. Chen says he does because an ace rimmer, well you know, it means,’ and he whispered into Ace Rimmer’s ear.

‘Doesn’t it annoy you, Chen’s homophobic comments? You don’t want to make a complaint? The JMC takes homophobia very seriously, but it’s aeons behind with trans.’ 

‘Chen’s just trying to include me... He’s always like that, like before I came out, he’d always taunt me with just this coarse, gross aggressive stuff, and it smegged me off then... but now... it’s his way of saying, you’re no different, you still get the same terrible treatment... which is fair, in a nice way...’

‘In a nice way you say,’ said Ace. ‘But you don’t want to hang out with him. It must be horrible, so boorish...’

‘Did I it you with my smegginess or something? Honestly, Todhunter...’ Hippy Rimmer patted Ace’s knee ‘why are you being so mean all of a sudden. Yes he’s on the boorish side, shall we say boorishish? But he’s Lister’s mate and I love Lister and we have to balance things out and make compromises to keep that love going.’ 

‘Beautiful,’ said Ace. Hippy Rimmer shrugged modestly, but Ace was actually referring to the sharp contours of Yvonne McGruder’s back, ripping through the tight cotton membrane of ship issue beige, not Hippy Rimmer’s decidedly unrimmery Hallmark slush. The rocky sharpness and hardness of bone and muscle stretching the starched uniform, interlocking sinews jostling sensuously as she shifted her weight. She was causing a problem for Kristine, who appeared to be agitatedly guarding the classified documents she had to deliver to the Captain as a formality. McGruder was pointing alternately at them and the infamous coffee machine, and exclaiming things that made her back muscles ripple a sensuous samba.

People came to the Corridor G branch of Starbug’s for the nostalgia for McJobs that had been replaced by machines, like the coffee machine two turns down, the hubub, the kind of companionable weft of humans that weren’t too separate and not too close in social space, but physically proximal in a setting that included the use of hessian, GELF pipe music and giant photos of people laughing and drinking coffee, as a kind of unsubtle background suggestion. What about the actual coffee though? Aside from the behavioural, performative and ideological aspects of it, it meant nothing to Ace, who was a hardlight hologram and had no use for caffeine – the hot coffee was inside him now in a holothermos, perfectly preserved. 

He took the empty cup and when Hippy Rimmer wasn’t looking, reached the cup into his body, scooping out the coffee and, making his excuses to a dreamy, easily distracted version of himself, approached Kochanski, handing her the coffee and saying with deliberate fallaciousness ‘Here, the coffee you ordered’ just as McGruder cheekily took the reprinted documents from her and looked at them. Kochanski’s eyes flashed with relief as she accepted the coffee and Ace gloated at her contrived accidental decanting of the hot coffee over the documents, additionally scolding McGruder’s hands, causing her to drop the sodden ream into a pulped brown puddle on the corridor floor. 

‘Fiddle-sticks,’ said Kochanski, unconvincingly. McGruder was giving Kochanski her famous prematch psych-out stare.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you a new one...’ said Ace.

‘It’s classified information,’ said McGruder, still staring scarily.

‘I meant the coffee,’ said Ace. McGruder did this kind of angry shimmy that Ace liked very much, and marched off down the corridor, McGruder that is. Ace marched to the coffee machine, and two skutters whizzed over to deal with the spill at Kochanski’s foot that tapped with fury. She’d been entrapped into confirming her touchy secrecy about the ship’s locomotion. And it wasn’t just him that wanted to know where they were and where they were going. McGruder was on the scent too. 

‘Understaffed are we?’ asked the coffee machine.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Look at me I’m all smudgy! I can’t stand it. Why don’t you get old Rimmer back on zed shift so I get my late night polish anymore? He ran a tight ship.’

‘He certainly did,’ said Ace proudly, pleased to finally get some recognition for his fastidiousness. ‘But I’m afraid Rimmer’s very sick, bedbound, it’s sad... But I’ll find someone else, I promise, to do some extra shifts, that is if you might be able to answer a question I’ve got, *off the record*...’

‘I’m listening..’ said the coffee machine.

‘I want you to tell me some *un*classified information,’ said Ace.

‘But you’re an officer, you have access to *all* unclassified information anyway,’ protested the coffee machine.

Kochanski stood there nonplussed. The pair of skutters took it in turns to scratch each other’s clawheads to help stimulate a plan. 

‘Exactly,’ said Todhunter ‘but I want to ask you *off the record, as a favour*, for some *un*classified information,’ he said, really hunkering down on the prefix for emphasis ‘because why would an officer ask a coffee machine for that?’

The coffee machine was just percolating the bizarre clandestine logic of it when directly in front of him a spritely Hippy Rimmer bounded up to Kochanski, obviously full to bursting with health, Hippy Rimmer that is, and embraced her.

‘Hey, you said he was sick!’ said the coffee machine.

‘The machine’s on the blink,’ said Ace Rimmer as he returned to Kochanski. 

‘Were you going to get another coffee?’ said Hippy Rimmer. ‘But you just had one! Don’t lapse into your amphetamine fueled retropunk days again, okay?’

‘I gotta go,’ said Kochanski. ‘I’ve got a date with...’ and then she mumbled and Hippy Rimmer mumbled along and they gave each other some mystical wink and went opposite directions, without a word to Ace who stood there gormlessly, wondering if at this rate he’d even figure out the stuff he was supposed to know – the extra-marital affairs, the deals with Lister and Rimmer and Kochanski, let alone the stuff he wasn’t, like who Kochanski was dating, and how they had come to acquire the dirt.

He crouched down with the skutters, who seemed to just jerkily move around, without affectively dealing with the spill. Oh well, thought Ace, at least their apprehension might apprehend people stepping in the papier mocha plinth. Kochanski and Hippy Rimmer seemed to just forget him when they left. They seemed caught up in some spell, like they were part of a cult or they thought they were cool or something. Now he was Todhunter, he was still the smeghead! Why did he always have to be the smeghead?

‘Frank Todhunter?’ said the military policeman.

‘Yes?’ said Ace, looking up pitifully.

‘The captain would like to ask you some questions...’

‘About the spill?’ he asked.

‘The skutters will handle that. This is serious. Come with me.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Ace.

‘Don’t you really?’ said the guard, menacingly.

‘No,’ he said as the guard jerked him up by the armpit and led him down the corridor. ‘The skutters are about as much use as a chocolate barbecue set.’

Hollister seemed to vibrate broodingly and flush slightly as the guard led Ace into his office. ‘Officer Todhunter,’ said the guard.

‘Frank,’ greeted Hollister. ‘Sit down, please.’ The guard lingered. ‘Now you know me...’ Yes, but Ace didn’t much. ‘I’m a straight shooting, honest, straight forward, roll your own sleeves up and down kind of regular cup of jo six pack kind of guy if you catch my straight forward honest homespun blueberry muffin drift. So I’m going to go right ahead and ask you a question, just a simple question and you’re going to answer that question straight up and down like the good honest man’s man that you damn well are, you hear me?’

‘I think so Captain,’ said Ace, a little scared.

‘Good. I knew I could trust you. A good solid four square free born English gentleman. So here’s my question... Where did you get the GELF?’

‘What GELF?’

‘The freaky baby Cronenburg GELF you smuggled aboard in your invisible spaceship, did a minor nasal operation on and then posted into the waste disposal.’

‘I think you’ve mistaken me, I’d never take an unquarantined creature aboard you know that...’

‘Holly’s got footage.’

‘Footage my arse.’

‘Maybe not that angle no but footage that’ll get your arse hauled to Floor 13.’

‘Floor what?’

‘That’s right, Frank. Animals means stasis but GELFs you get jail. That means we freeze your pay without paying the curtesy of freezing your body along with it. If you don’t want to end up poor and old then you better answer my question straight up, no frisking.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Okay, let’s take a different tack. Where were you at noon today?’ The real question, thought Ace, is where *wasn’t* Todhunter at noon today. There was a real Todhunter aboard of course and apparently an actual prison on a secret floor, which as an officer he was supposed to know already. And there were police with guns. It wasn’t fair for Todhunter to go to jail for something he didn’t do. Ace broke into a holosweat. It reminded him of that time he saved that civilisation in the Mogadon Cluster from giant GELFs that could breath in space by participating in an improv grand-slam for reasons too circuitous to get into. Think! Say something... Anything!

‘I was having bum sex with Bent Bob in the karaoke bar on G Deck.’

‘Thornton!’ shouted Hollister suddenly, making Ace holojump.

The military policeman entered with a shackled, gibbering, broken Todhunter, his face shining with spit and blood and the sweat of fear. He stared at Ace with angry, confused, bloodshot eyes and exclaimed simply ‘Please...’ The military policeman tasered him and he screamed in agony.

‘Don’t taser him, Thornton...’

‘Sir.’

‘...Too much.’ Ace turned back to Hollister, who said to him. ‘Sorry, Frank, it seems you’ve got an imposter impersonating you. Maybe he’s from another dimension, that’s what Kochanski reckons...’ The howling and tasering was slowly fading out in the background as the overzealous MP dragged Todhunter down the corridor. ‘Holly? Send a memo to Todhunter’s wife and children informing them he’s an active homosexual. Sorry, Frank, you know how the JMC is about marital infidelity...’

Ace stood in the corridor outside Hollister’s office, holonumb. This is terrible, he thought. He was supposed to work out what was going on in this dimension, what made it tick. It was supposed to help him become Ace somehow. Introducing the BEGG wasn’t a bad idea: by setting up some chaos or starting some kind of story or process, you get drawn into a world. If only it was him going to jail, being accused of interdimensional espionage, whatever, it would thicken the plot and help him unlock his destiny. The real Todhunter was prepared to go to jail rather than hurt his family but had ended up doing both, thanks to our hero. The thing about this catastrophe that Ace didn’t understand was... there was no karaoke bar on G Deck. He zombie walked down the corridor. The ship felt empty, spooky, but you got these pockets, just like in any city, where everything would suck out of an area randomly and would seem spellbound. Ace caught his reflection in a window some skutters had actually cleaned. He wore Todhunter’s body awkwardly, like a set of clothes he didn’t have the confidence to carry off. Why couldn’t he convince them he wasn’t him? The one time it would have paid to look uncomfortable in your own skin. 

‘What a div,’ said Ace aloud. Pride comes before a fall, but so does humiliation, as it does in this instance when Ace is suddenly hit on the head with a pole with great force.

‘Don’t you’ll kill him!’ comes a shout out of the blinding pain. Ace clutches his head and staggers.

‘Look he’s okay! He’s an interdimensional freak!’ Another voice, and blurred, masked figures. Ace suddenly remembers he’s a hardlight hologram undercover in a flesh and blood world. He deliberately drops to the floor, a deadman playing dead. The baseball bat rises, going in for the finish, but Ace flinches at the last degree of its arc, rolling out the way. Damn, if only he could let them finish him off, they’d probably kidnap him and he could figure out just what the hell was going down in this thread.

A boot suddenly appeared to be zooming towards his face and before he could repress his defensive instincts, Ace had pushed the boot, along with the person it shod far down the corridor, which they slid the rest of the way down, finally hitting a vending machine which scolded them with chicken soup. The rest of the gang ran after them, terrified of this pandimensional ninja.

‘Wait!’ says Ace pointlessly, and bolts after them. He kneels down by the vending machine. A chicken soup spattered cat mask covers the hunched figure’s face. He lifts the mask. It’s Chen.

<~k

‘Kryten?’ said Kochanksi’s voice from the darkness.

‘Yes, ma’am?’ came the reply.

‘You and I have never... at all... not... ever... even slightly... got on, have we?’

‘No, ma’am,’ said Kryten.

‘Is it because I’m a woman?’

‘I don’t see why that would... I mean... it’s not *that* exactly... it’s because... yes, ma’am,’ he relented.

‘Why don’t you like women?’ said Kochanski.

‘Because of the effect they have on men,’ said Kryten.

‘You’re very doting of Dave, aren’t you?’

‘I love Mr Lister. You have to remember how deeply engrained cleaning is as part of my programming. I never wanted to break my programming. I had to do it to keep Mr Lister. It was one part of my programming pitted against another. 

‘If only I could get through all the tutorials on lying and rattle off a few insults, Mr Lister would be happy and I could continue cleaning. Mr Lister never tried to stop me doing my domestic duties, except that one time I made him waffles. I flushed that waffle iron out into space.... 

‘If you like cleaning you need dirt, and Mr Lister never failed to disappoint. He’s like a veritable dirt fountain, spraying dirt out in every direction. No matter how much you clean up after him, everywhere he’s been there’s just this lovely grubbiness to get stuck into.’

‘So why were you so threatened by my arrival? Did you think I was going to steal your source of dirt?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Kryten.

‘You know before machines women did all the cleaning and housework?’

‘What all of it? And they couldn’t even use machines to help them?’

‘Everything, by hand, everyday.’

‘You’re serious? Well that explains feminism! I understand now!’

‘You never understood feminism before?’

‘I never understood what all the fuss is about. But now I understand: machines were largely developed by men, and although women still get to do *some* housework, it’s largely been appropriated by machines. Men stole your dirt!’

‘Er... yeah, that’s what I meant...’ What was the point?

‘And then, to add insult to injury, the machines, like me, then get classified as females! So the masculine source of this great theft is obfuscated, making it impossible to complain!’

‘You have a unique take on the situation,’ was all she could manage.

‘Thankyou.’ Then she decided to troll him harder.

‘You know you should discuss your ideas with the rest of the female prisoners. Especially that butch Russian cook.’

‘What you mean suggest that women would be happier if they did more domestic chores and cleaning?’

‘Why stop there? You know in the past women were treated as sex objects?’

‘You mean like pleasure GELFs and sexbots?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But that’s a multitrillion dollarpound industry, how are women expected to compete? Maybe I should suggest that what would be ideal is if women had to scrub all day and do it wearing tantalising titillating microbikinis and filmed from every angle and broadcast live. That would get them back on track.’

‘Yes, that’s great idea, you should suggest that, especially to the cook...’

‘I dated a GELF once.’ This surprised Kochanski, she thought that sort of thing only appealed to slimy Rimmery men.

‘What happened?’

‘She turned out not to be who I thought she was. I thought she was a mech like me, then it turned out she was a GELF. But that made me like her more. To know she wasn’t what I thought she was.’

‘So you fell in love with her.’

‘I guess.’

‘And was she in love with you?’

‘I guess.’

‘So who did she mistake you for?’

‘No-one, she thought I was a mech and I was. Why would she mistake me for someone?’

‘Because it always works that way. Like me and Cat. I thought he was pretending to be smart, which I just can’t stand. All that silillilum drive check stuff. He thought I was some distant unobtainable “babe” character. But in our very misrecognition of each other we had to puzzle each other out: I had to figure out that he was actually playing dumb. Cat has smarts. He had to figure out that I was a lot closer to him than he imagined, that all the strife with you and Lister which isolated him, also isolated me, it ended up isolating us together, percolating love.

‘Or like in Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth wants to present herself to Darcy as a young cultivated woman, full of wit, and she gets from him the message “you are nothing but a poor empty-minded creature, full of false finesse”… Darcy wants to present himself to her as a proud gentleman, and he gets from the her the message “your pride is nothing but contemptible arrogance”. After the break in their relationship each discovers, through a series of accidents, the true nature of the other – she the sensitive tender nature of Darcy, he her real dignity and wit – and the novel ends as it should, with their marriage.’

‘I still don’t see how this relates to me and Camille.’

‘But you said yourself that it made you love her more to find out she wasn’t what you thought she was.’

‘And?’

‘Is that normal for a mech, to fall in love with a big bowl of slime just because you thought she wasn’t a big bowl of slime? I mean, isn’t that the kind of batsmeg crazy paradoxical way of thinking typically exhibited by humans?’

‘I suppose it is.’ Mournful clanking preempted the silence. ‘So, if we’re bunkmates, and Lister and Mr Nanorimmer are bunkmates – where’s Cat?’

‘It’s a mystery, I’ve hardly even caught a glimpse since we were imprisoned. Plan is to enrol in some extracurricular mixed-sex activities. Lister reckons there’s a vocal group. There’s some kind of study group as well – could help Nanorimmer with his astronavs as well and give you a chance to hang out with smelly men.’

‘Ah, I do like being around smelly dirty men,’ said Kryten with alacrity. ‘Did you know I accidently turned myself into a human male once?’

‘The DNA machine. If only we could get it back, I could turn myself into a Cat and settle down with Cat and have kittens...’

‘That’s what you want?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Kochanski had already single handedly smashed a billion years of patriarchy by reproducing via temporal paradox. Now she wanted to leave behind the human altogether. Nature would bend to her desire.

‘Have you heard of Birdman.’

‘Sure that crazy Welsh conspiracist everyone talks about.’

‘He may be able to help.’ 

<~k

‘*Voila!*’ exclaimed Hippy Rimmer removing the cloche with a flourish, a certain elan he once reserved for his extra special made up salutes. The former contents of the cloche also bore the creativity no longer restricted to hip-twisting salutes and revision time table colour schemes. It was a curry.

‘It’s a curry! Me favourite!’ said Lister, tucking in. 

‘And do you notice anything *different* about that curry, Listy?’ said Rimmer, hovering.

‘Yeah,’ said Lister nonchalantly, putting down his fork and drawing his boyfriend close by the waist for a moment, making Rimmer loosen. He chowed down on the delicious hot, spicy curry. Rimmer showed Lister the palms of his hands, fingers pointing down, and raised his eyebrows with exasperation. 

‘What?’ he asked finally.

‘Well it was made with love, by me boyfriend wasn’t it?’

‘Incorrect!’ said Rimmer. Lister’s fork hit the plate and he had to stop himself let the curry fall from his mouth.

‘No! No! No!’ Rimmer protested, showing Lister his palms again but with the fingers going up. ‘I love you, you’re my boyfriend, I made it with love. But the thing that’s different about it, the thing I meant, the thing you’re supposed to work out is... it’s tofu...’

The fork hit the plate again as Lister asked ‘Toe-food?’

‘Tofu – it’s a traditional vegan food from China. It has a lot of texture and protein and not much flavour so you can use it like meat.’

‘You mean there’s no meat in this?’

‘No,’ said Rimmer proudly.

‘No smeg.’

‘Definitely no smeg.’ 

‘But what’s the point of making vegan food when they came out with those battery farmed brain dead animals that don’t feel pain and are less conscious than plants?’

‘To commemorate the billions of species and the countless humans and devastation to resources and the planet caused by pointless meat eating.’

‘I don’t know though,’ said Lister cheekily ‘it might be just a little bit better with a bit of meat in it to be honest.’ If Lister hadn’t pretended to duck out of the way, Rimmer’s pretending to smack the back of his head would have made contact (failing its pretence). That’s how synched they were.

‘It’s just so crypto-fascist,’ said Rimmer.

‘Here we go,’ chipped in Lister between mouthfuls.

‘Our food is in the shape of murder and torture and subjugation.’

‘Like a gingerbread slaughterhouse?’ offered Lister.

‘It’s still going on. Look at this poor GELF they’re persecuting.’

‘What GELF?’ asked Lister.

‘The BEGG. Some smeg stowed a BEGG...’

‘In a keg?’

‘Yes,’ said Rimmer with absolute seriousness. Lister smirked. ‘Todhunter’s gone down for bringing a BEGG on board. The thing’s gone out of control... and so has the Jupiter Garbage Worker’s Union. Now somehow they’re sending convicts in there with bazookoids to *kill* the poor defenceless thing. Like that’s okay somehow.’

Lister casually flicked open a can of Leopard Lager and took a glug. ‘You been gadding about town again, picking up all the latest goss?’

‘Frankenstein’s Monsters...’ Lister threatened to spit the beer out of his mouth with fake amusement. ‘...are threatening to kill it themselves if Hollister doesn’t step in.’

‘What? A corridor gang named after Kochanksi’s pet cat?’ Lister shook his head wryly and resumed curry shovelling.’

‘It’s serious... they’re growing in strength...’

‘Is she with...’ and he mumbled, self censoring out of habit, ‘…tonight again?’ Rimmer assented with a nod and croak.

‘Good well we’ll be able to get an early night so we can have bushy tails tomorrow morning no?’

‘But Todhunter’s in jail now isn’t he Listy? For releasing the BEGG...’

‘All the more reason then, to keep morale up, keep everythin tickety-boo....’

‘But I’ve got to organise a campaign against Frankenstein’s Monsters: BEGG Lives Matter!’

‘Rimmer you’re just stirring things up even more, we need to maintain the status quo, we need that, we talked about that...’

‘Okay, there’s another reason we might not be able to get an early night tonight...’

‘What’s that?’

Just then Harrison appeared at the open doorway wearing a little black dress and carrying a bottle of wine and an awkward looking black handbag. Her rosebud lips no sooner formed a cute smile then it melted with disappointment. Lister’s fork clanked again as he looked up. ‘Oh, I’m sorry I thought this was where the party was happening tonight,’ she said nervously.

‘Actually it kind of is. Sorry, Lister. Sit down, make yourself at home,’ said Rimmer. He put on a Charlatans cassette. He still liked Hammond organ but he’d been trying different stuff. He liked Jimmy Smith also and Blur and The Beastie Boys. He cleared a bunch of stuff off this sofa he and Lister had liberated, kind of shaped like a rock n’ roll Americar, and patted the seat, fussing off to find a corkscrew.

‘Chen kind of invited everyone to come here tonight. You said we should make an effort more yourself or people will think something weird is going on.’

‘Why, *is* something weird going on?’ asked Harrison.

‘No,’ they replied in unison.

‘By the way my name’s Harrison,’ said Harrison.

‘I know,’ said Lister.

‘You do?’ said Harrison.

‘No,’ they both said in unison. Rimmer had retrieved the bottle opener and helped Harrison with the wine. 

‘I think it’s nice to meet some... *new* people and get out of the... stay in the... ah smeg...’ he pointed at Rimmer ‘but we’re still working tomorrow.’

‘Didn’t you hear? Todhunter’s gone into Stasis or something... for smuggling a BEGG on board,’ said Harrison.

‘And you’re saying?’ said Lister.

‘Bunch of the Frankenstein’s Monsters lot, and the rubbish workers, they’re going AWOL - they reckon Todhunter’s being scapegoated under this plan to replace their jobs with GELFs and robots. It’s all part of this conspiracy bullsmeg.’

‘Well I’m going to work,’ said Lister.

‘Even if Hollister doesn’t kill the GELF?’ she asked.

‘I told you,’ said Rimmer, pointing at Lister.

‘He’s not killing the GELF – it’s against Space Corps Directives.’

‘Lister, in the last five minutes, you’ve thrown the Space Corps book at me and used the phrase tickety-boo, and now you’re going to let these crypto-fascists kill an innocent BEGG, just because you don’t want to rock the boat, don’t you see we’ve changed places. What happened to the young revolutionary you?’

‘Kochanski’s Bunkmate!’ said Harrison. She had appeared at the door. Kochanski’s bunkmate. Although Harrison knew Kochanski’s bunkmate quite well (they belonged to all the same clubs and enjoyed opera and stereotypically posh pursuits) she knew her only as Kochanski’s Bunkmate because that’s how Kochanski’s Bunkmate was known, even by those who knew her quite well. Like Harrison.

‘Oh, hi Harrison,’ said Kochanski’s Bunkmate. ‘Hi boys, has anyone seen Kochanski?’ She hated to ask, as if she was entirely defined by her bunkmate or something.

‘She’s with...’ everyone said roughly in unison followed by a vague three way vocal fry.

‘I really need a shoulder to cry on..’

‘I have shoulders to cry on,’ said Harrison.

Kochanski’s Bunkmate sat by Harrison on the Americana sofa and Harrison put her arm around her and moved her glass along the coffee table towards her. ‘Did you hear, Todhunter’s in stasis because of some rubbish gobbling entity.’ She took the glass and drained its contents as Hippy Rimmer pranced over with a fresh one for Harrison. ‘He’s been framed, there’s no way he would keep a secret from me like that. He told everything to me. Everything.’

‘I’m sure they’ll sort it out, Hollister will kill the GELF and they’ll find out it’s a mix up and let him out soon enough.’

‘But I’m worried. Do you really think they’re smart enough to figure things out? Some higher power is introducing these... efficiencies. The lower orders are getting riled, getting violent, demanding answers. Hollister’s using Frank to appease them.’ Her tough stance suddenly broke and she squeaked, breaking down ‘And now I’ll never see him again, he’ll be frozen in a cubicle like a popsicle till the BEGGs come home...’

‘What’s up with her?’ asked McGruder, swaggering in with McCauley and handing Lister a fresh beer from a six-pack clasped to her six-pack. Harrison topped up her and Kochanski’s Bunkmate’s glasses correspondingly. Rimmer didn’t drink, he had gone quiet, receding into the top bunk, concentrating on something in his lap.

‘I was having an *affair* with Todhunter, OK?’ Everyone was in their civvies and looked dressed to party in a kind of trashy, mining ship way except Kochanski’s Bunkmate in her standard overalls. She had just come to check if Kochanski was around.

‘And you knew about it,’ said McCauley, pointing at Lister with a freshly opened Leopard Lager. ‘That’s how you’ve been bunking off work innit, cos you’re mates wiv Kochanski! Don’t worry darlin’,’ she said turning to Kochanski’s Bunkmate ‘it’s the Deep JMC, we’re gonna get them. FREE BIRDMAN!’ she suddenly shouted, saluting with her can.

‘They froze him for good reason,‘ said Kochanski’s Bunkmate. ‘He used to terrorize Frank and the officers.’

‘Ar,’ said McCauley sarcastically before rolling her eyes and doing the vomit sign.

‘Well this isn’t very friendly is it? Anyone would think Listykins and I should be forgiven for not going out with you miserable lot anymore.’ His voice came from the shadows of the top bunk. All you could see was the tip of his nose and his slender legs dangling out of the bunk. ‘Well, let’s smoke a doobie - that usually helps... Boomshanka!’ he exclaimed, strenuously holding his breath and leaning down to pass the joint to Lister.

Kochanski’s Bunkmate glanced at Harrison, who said ‘Ghastly extremists...’ and awkwardly tried to take a sip of wine *at the same time*. Her elbow jerked open her awkward handbag and a plastic cat mask clattered out. A boot quickly covered it. Kochanski’s Bunkmate saw the mask and the boot and saw that the boot shod Chen, who’d come in with Selby moments before, already dishing out fresh beers. Thus revealing to Kochanski’s Bunkmate that Chen and Harrison were both Frankenstein’s Monsters along with McCauley and... *everyone*?

‘We’re trying to help you,’ said McCauley to Kochanski’s Bunkmate.

‘See it’s working already,’ said Lister chuckling and exhaling and passing the joint to McGruder.

‘How are you helping me?’ She moved away from Harrison.

‘Give uz a ciggie, Chen.’

‘Can’t you stop bumming fags for a second, Dave?’ Rimmer covers his face and falls backwards into the darkness of the bunk.

‘We’re trying to get to the bottom of whatever dark dealings your fella’s got himself embroiled in innit?’ Regardless, Kochanski’s Bunkmate was certain if it wasn’t for these creepy cats, her ‘fella’ wouldn’t have been caught, people wouldn’t have found out about it and there wouldn’t be the need to punish him so severely. 

‘If you ask me, Frankenstein’s Monsters are behind the whole thing.’ She was leaving when she almost belly flopped into Petersen.

Petersen had hands on his shoulders, Ace was can-canning him in there. They’d been drinking. Ace in the form of Kochanski’s Bunkmate’s lover, Todhunter.

‘Frank!’ exclaimed Kochanski’s Bunkmate.

‘Kochanski’s Bunkmate!’ said Ace. Did people call that to her face? Even with Petersen’s face as a buffer. Petersen was nose to nose with Kochanski’s Bunkmate. His breath was hell gas.

‘You’re okay! I thought you were in stasis because of the BEGG,’ she said, bobbing from side to side. Ace was toggling Petersen’s gormlessly rigid body from side to side as well but they kept second guessing each other, blocking each other’s view. 

‘That wasn’t me! It was some imposter who looks just like me!’

‘Thornton told me everything. I saw him lead you in shackles down Corridor G.’

‘He told you everything? You mean? So you know.’ She didn’t know.

‘Forget it Frank, I mean, I thought we didn’t have secrets, I mean working with dark mysterious bodies. But we can move past this,’ and she chucked Petersen aside who collapsed heavily to the floor as a kind of metaphor of what they had to move past and grabbed him and kissed him deeply. This wasn’t right, he’d wrecked Todhunter’s life, now he was snogging his mistress. Ace could feel her soft breasts through the cheap uniform, the hot eagerness of her mouth, her hands in his hair...

‘Wait, this isn’t right, I’m not him...’

‘But you just said you were.’

‘No I didn’t.’

‘You better not be! Do you know how many people you just put out of a job?’ chipped in McCauley threateningly. 

‘Now, now, simmer down,’ said Lister getting the joint back.

‘No, no, I didn’t release the BEGG,’ said Ace absentmindedly to McCauley. ‘I have an alibi, that’s why they let me go – I was too busy having bumsex with Bent Bob in the karaoke bar on G deck.’

‘You were what?!’ Kochanski’s Bunkmate punched Todhunter/Ace very hard and yelled ‘The whole time I was fucking you and was thinking of him!’ She was pointing at Hippy Rimmer. You couldn’t slam spaceship doors so she simply punched Ace a second time and stormed off.

Harrison moved over to Hippy Rimmer and said, beneath the burble of Hammond she hoped ‘Me too, to be honest,’ and tickled his knees. 

Lister gestured to Ace, a come over here gesture with both hands. Look at the poor sod. Todhunter, I mean, Ace. Ace could just run to him, could just tell him everything, but instead straight away trips on Petersen who is still on the floor and lands flat on his face. He wishes his pride was hardlight too, after being hit on the head with a pole, tasered and punched twice in the face, but he has to suck it in. ‘She chucked me!’ he says staring pitifully into Lister’s eyes. He only surmised they were in a relationship minutes ago.

‘No!’ denied Petersen also from the floor. ‘She chucked *me*, you just tripped!’ 

‘What is this? Ten green bottles,’ said McGruder, rifling round the kitchenette. Ace climbed onto an old amplifier next to Lister and Lister offered him the joint. Great, thought Ace, this will have no affect on me as I’m a hardlight hologram. Lister and Rimmer will get all monged and explain to me just what the smeg is going on. All he’d got so far was some barely audible rantings about an old man, a bird, a cat and a robot from the future from Petersen while they checked the drive plates. Petersen was far gone, to the point of hallucinating, as if Ace wasn’t there and others were. Ace inhaled deeply from the joint, filling his whole holobody with smoke like the chamber of a giant bong, and then blew it out along with everyone’s minds.

‘Smegging hell,’ said McCauley. 

‘What is this?’ asked McGruder, who’d retrieved a chunkasoy from the pot in the kitchenette. Rimmer was waving his hands prohibitively, he wanted Lister to have it for breakfast.

‘It’s Chinese health food. Tofu.’

‘Tofu, more like Getyou,’ quipped McCauley.

Lister put his arm round Todhunter’s shoulder. ‘If it makes you feel any better,’ said Harrison from the top bunk, audible above the Hammond burr ‘when I was going out with Rimmer... I was thinking of you.’ She blew him a kiss, then winked at Rimmer who passed a fresh joint to Lister.

‘So why do you think it’s okay to kill a poor innocent BEGG then? Are you a racist?’ said Rimmer to Harrison.

‘No! I just... my brother works in garbage disposal, there’s nothing to do, it’s depressing...’

‘Can’t he read a book, learn how to paint...’

‘Rimmer, some people just aren’t *like* that...’ said Lister.

‘That’s not true, it’s conditioning.’

‘I thought it was just naturally frizzy.’

Chen and Selby had ghettoised the sofa where they sat drinking at comfortably twice the speed of the others. Hippy Rimmer had noticed and imagined he was lip reading psychedelic gibberish. What Chen was actually saying right now was ‘Look at those two, what’s going on with them...’

‘Well,’ said Selby in a mock patronising tone, automatically breaking open another LL. ‘Some people have a mummy and a daddy and *some* people have a daddy and a d-‘

‘Not that you big greasy git, something else, like how they know Kochanski and Kochanski’s related to.. you know, to the...’

‘To the Deep Dwarf, I get it.’

‘I don’t get these loony liberals,’ McGruder was saying to McCauley as they hid in the kitchenette alcove, which didn’t actually allow them to hide, but they pretended to hide in the kitchenette as they ate the rest of Lister’s curry. ‘I don’t see the problem, it’s the law of the Universe. But then I’m a boxing champ... I have to hit back, it’s in my essence, to spring straight back, if they take our jobs,’ and then she had to break off and continue to communicate in air boxing moves.

‘It’s weird being bisexual isn’t it?’ Lister was saying to Todhunter.

‘Er, yeah, it is...’ said Ace stiffly.

‘I mean, you don’t have to but if there’s anything you ever wanted to talk about..’ He really stretched the word ‘talk’. 

‘There is something I’ve been wondering about actually, kind of philosophical, it’s hard to explain why I care but...’ 

Lister handed him the joint. ‘Here, this might help,’ he said. Ace started hoovering the joint up again but Chen had to intervene...

‘Cut it out Todster, you’re making that cherry hotter than a willy full of chilly.’

‘Sorry,’ said Ace, handing him the joint, suddenly realising the *faux pas* and suddenly nearly passing out.

‘Yo! UK?’ asked Lister. Lister was freaked out, he could have sworn Todhunter appeared to him, just for a second, translucent and full of smoke.

‘It’s all very well all this stuff about the web of life and loving your neighbour and all your hippy stuff,’ Harrison was saying to Hippy Rimmer. ‘But if Frankenstein’s Monsters are right the Deep Dwarf is putting us all on the garbage heap, we’re BEGG food basically...’

‘What I’ve been wondering, a friend was wondering, you know kind of speculative wine bar chat...’

‘Oh, I know all about what goes on in wine bars,’ said Lister.

‘Do you think a decision someone makes can change their sexuality?’

Lister seemed to mull it over non-judgementally. Promising, thought Ace. Maybe he was close to finding out what the decision he made in this dimension that made him gay was. And a hippy. Lister took a sip of LL and leaned back on the haunches of his chair, revealing the generosity of his equipment, swaddled in JMC longjohns. He suddenly seemed to frown sternly, slowly rocked forward and cradling his angelic face with his forearms asked innocently ‘What was the question again?’

‘PLEASE....!’ screamed McIntyre (he was standing in the door way in his holopyjamas), ‘....can you keep it down! You can and have actually literally woken the dead with this organ music.’

‘Mmm, making music with my organ, baby,’ said McCauley, grinding at McGruder who put her in an armlock to the titillation of Chen and Selby.

‘PLEASE...!’ screamed Petersen from beneath McIntyre ‘...Can you stop standing in my balls.’ Standing *in* my balls, that’s how he said it, because McIntyre’s light bee was designed to project the image of his body cropped to an even distance to the ground. He tip toed out phobically, realised everyone was laughing at him and left.

‘That was a bit holophobic,’ said Rimmer sadly shaking his head.

‘He was a bit... standing in my balls...’ said Petersen.

‘Get up...’ said Lister.

‘I can’t.’

‘Bullpat.’

Hippy Rimmer was still ranting about the GELF and Ace Rimmer was catching phrases like ‘full democracy’, ‘liberate the universe’, that he liked, and talking about how some theorised there were many dimensions ramifying from all the countless decisions made by countlessly diverse organisms and they all wanted to be liberated. Ace thought about the care it took to rescue Snuffles and fix its snuffly thing.

‘I’m with you,’ he said extending his arm up to meet his fellow Rimmer’s hanging from the top bunk. When he touched his double he got a really strange sensation, like he was really, really real. ‘Let’s rescue that poor GELF if need be!’

‘Let’s start a campaign to sway opinion so we might not have to!’ said Hippy Rimmer.

‘Okay, okay, I’m in...’ slurred Lister *apropos* nothing, ‘but we’re all going to work tomorrow OK, bright and early...’ No-one responded. It was 3am. McIntyre was digging into his new role as the Rimmer of the ship, barraging Holly with detailed complaints next door. Ace left for the toilet. He switched on the air extractor and let the marijuana smoke plume out of his body. Except it didn’t. Because there wasn’t any. Strange. Ace lost his balance. He couldn’t even stagger because the space was too small, he just got stuck and passed out straight away.

Ace was flying across the desert with the Ace that came before him, on their magic carpet. The desert was so smooth like paper and it coiled and swirled and rippled hypnotically, melting like internet buffering with the intense heat burning him up. And the carpet swept down and hung closer to the contours of the desert and Ace, our Ace, saw an Indian or Native American man walking towards the horizon with a totally gratuitous buttcrack. The buttcrack bisected a proud, plump arse that just really popped you know was just all there, bouncing around, in the sun...

And Ace was expecting the Native American guy to be wise because that would seem to be the point of the whole cheesy stereotypical example right? So the carpet zooms down to the American Indian, who instead of turning around and saying something wise just keeps walking and the field of vision zooms right down on his butt, so it fills it, and Christopher Hitchen’s miniature head appears from the arse and says ‘When you consider the vast expanse of Universi and Dimensions spreading hither and thither like Indra’s Web, all of it screaming for freedom, can you believe how much it used to eat you up, a bowl of purposefully cold soup.’

‘Purposefully cold soup! Purposefully cold soup!’ repeated Ace waking in a Gazpacho-temperature holosweat. He blinked. He was on the Sofe-car. The room was strewn with LL cans and cigarette ends, half eaten curry... but he realised now there was something else. What was it - love? Hippy Rimmer was asleep in the bunk opposite him. 

The room was never completely dark, nor completely light. But right now, this instant, it was shot through with moonglow, illuminating galaxies of dust motes in the dry, fake air. The *décor* was two tone: dark grey bolts punctuating cool matte grey walls, smoothed by the spooky lunar light. Like the beige uniforms, the look was submariney, appearing to be brutalist steel but actually made of some light weight graphene substance painted grey. The rooms, like the molecular structure of the material they were made of, were hexagonal, packed together, teselating with mathematical efficiency like honeycomb. Holly was bobbing genially, but his head appeared oddly conical. 

‘Morning, Holly!’ said Ace.

‘Morning, Frank!’ said Holly.

‘Holly, please check for me, are there any unquarantined cats aboard this ship.’

‘Ynyos,’ said Holly.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Oh there’s a BEGG alright, I thought you knew about that...’

‘Very good, but is there a cat is what I’m asking, is there something wrong with your voice circuits?’

‘No.’

‘No there isn’t a cat?’

‘No.’

Ace sighed and decided to take it from the top. ‘Is there a cat on board?’

‘Nynoes,’ said Holly.

‘Holly, is there a cat on board?’

‘Ynoe,’ said Holly.

‘Very well. Is there a bird on board and if so where?’

‘There’s a sparrow in the Hole in the Brig on Floor 13. Anything else?’

‘One more thing. Any cats?’

‘Any cats what?’ said Holly.

‘Any cats on the ship?’

‘Nyo,’ said Holly.

‘Fine,’ said Ace, making to leave vigorously.

‘Ow!! Smeg! You smeg!’ said Petersen. Petersen was in such pain when Ace accidently booted his sleeping form in the stomach that he didn’t notice something fall from his pocket and skuttle into the corridor. Petersen continued to groan and curse as Ace turned the thing around in his hand. It was a pocketsized device of some kind with just a gage on the front and the words ‘Dimension Detector’ and then parenthetically and apologetically beneath it ‘[Working Title]’ in the same microgramma font. He pocketed it and strolled off down the corridor.

‘Hard at work, Todhunter? Like to see everybody hard at work. Doing your job? Making sure everyone’s hard at work?’ said Hollister, his round frame rounding the corner making Ace jump.

‘Yessir,’ said Ace with a clipped discipline.

Hollister put his hand on Ace’s back. ‘There’s no need for all that formality with me. You know me. Call me Frank, Frank,’ said Frank.

‘Thanks, Frank,’ said Ace. ‘By the way, I was wondering, if it wasn’t too much trouble, if I might be granted a prison visit to my evil twin. Maybe by talking to him it might shed light on why he might be impersonating me and what his angle is.’

‘Oh, we’ve got that guy... walk and talk, walk and talk,’ they sauntered down the corridor ‘goofed up to the eyeballs on psychotropics, running the whole psychic mash through an AR program, see what kind of guy we got... Oh he’s an extra-dimensional alright... *very* interesting... turns out he’s an a-li-en, but never mind... he’s got a Wooooh,’ he suddenly *falsetto*ed ‘lot going on...’

‘Really??’ asked Ace.

‘Brr- Oh yeah,’ said Hollister, pursing his lips and nodding and staring.

‘Are you sure the pychotropic/AR system really works as a form of judgement? I mean last night I dreamt Christopher Hitchens was talking to me out of a Native Ameican’s buttcrack - I mean what does that say about me?’

‘Thornton?!’ screamed Hollister ‘Just kidding, Frank. Stand at ease, Thornton.’

They commandeered a lift. In the lift was a naked man in a shower. ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Ace.

‘What’s it look like I’m taking a lift innit,’ said the naked man in a shower.

‘No I mean, what are you doing here like that?’ Hollister was kind of wafting his wrist subtly as if to shoo away the social situation descending upon them.

‘Like what?’ said the man.

‘He’s just like that, no one knows what his deal is, just leave it,’ whispered Hollister through the pursed corner of his mouth.

‘I heard that!’ called the man after them as they left the lift. ‘For your information I don’t have a deal! I am deal free! Just taking a lift...’

‘You know when that guy gets on well?’ said Hollister as they walked towards the Drive Room.

‘When?’ said Ace, wondering if that stuff last night had somehow had an affect.

‘When he’s *actually* taking a shower,’ said Hollister.

‘Figures,’ said Ace. Hollister offered Ace a doughnut as they entered the Drive Room and he declined. 

Hollister grabbed one himself and said, as he entered his office ‘Talking of figures, I better crunch some myself, this ship won’t fly itself!’

‘Well actually it is kind of automated and can totally do that,’ said Carol Brown snarkily as soon as the door closed.

‘This doughnut won’t eat itself!’ snarked Karen Newton.

Ace suddenly started laughing along and said, for some reason ‘Ha, ha, Hollister’s a smeghead isn’t he!’ 

There was an awkward pause and then Carol said ‘Are you confused about your sexuality?’.

Just then Kochanski entered and Ace felt the Dimensional Detector vibrate in his pocket. Was Kochanski from another dimension? Like him. Then a device in Kochanski’s pocket began vibrating and beeping also. Ace absorbed his Dimensional Detector into his body by making a patch of soft light in his hardlight pocket to hide it, because it kept vibrating like mad. He bet that gage was off the dial.

‘What’s that?’ said Ace, pointing to Kochanski’s shiny red pocket.

‘This?’ said Kochanski, blushingly brandishing the sleek oblong. ‘This is my ismeg.’

‘Your what?’

‘ismeg. It’s 21st century communications technojunk. Most of it they melted down to make into technology to mitigate catastrophic climate events. You know, when they internationally agreed to turn the internet off once it got just way too snarky?’ Kochanski’s education was better than Ace’s, but so was Todhunter’s, so he bluffed along. ‘Anyway, The Canaries found them on this rusty derelict. Lister reckons they’ll calm everyone down. They work as a means for pacifying mass society. It’s worked before. Things are starting to foment, have you noticed? You should get one, ask Holly, actually I’ll smegbook him right now...’

‘Just one question... who are The Canaries, some kind of *acapella* vocal group one imagines...’

‘Todhunter? Have you been living under a rock? Oh, yeah... yep. Why haven’t you heard of the Canaries, you’re an Officer...’

‘I know, I’ve just never been that into vocal music I guess.’

‘The Canaries are a superhard convict army from the brig on Floor 13. They do all the nasty scary jobs in Outer Space which there’s an improbable amount of... Look, Dwarfleaks released this video this afternoon.’ The video showed a group of large fat men, not that scary really, kind of Daddies or bears, wearing these weird bright yellow uniforms doing training exercises in a gym.

‘A whole army versus a baby,’ said Brown sadly.

‘They could just blow the whole place up,’ said Newton.

‘Charming,’ said Brown.

‘I’m just saying,’ said Karen ‘It’s just busywork for the cons.’

Sister Talia Garret whooshed by, her thin frame veiled in spirituality signalling muslin.

‘Good luck,’ said Kochanski.

‘I don’t believe in luck,’ said Sister Talia Garret, knocking and entering Hollister’s office.

Kochanski was tapping into her device >hello lover<. 

>hello lover< came the response.

>parrots?< she wrote.

>no, I was just repeating what you said<

>huh? no, parrots for dinner, silly...<

>i knew that. see you at 8?<

>try and stop me!<

>can we both just try and go?<

>bye lover<

>bye lover<

>parrot!<

>hey treacle tits – don’t let them kill this gelf okay?’

‘War and domination! In space I always dreamed of building a new world, free from suppression and exploitation...’

‘Really?’ asked Kochanski. ‘That’s quite extreme isn’t it?’

‘Wasn’t it Eve who bit the apple? She boldly went where no-one had gone before. Maybe as women we can do that again, forge some spiritual revolution where baby BEGGs don’t need to be persecuted, where the rights of women and children and non-human lifeforms are protected.’

‘Smegging hell,’ said Carol.

>is this all it is? the stupid internet thing? it’s just a screen you can put letters on like a word processor!<

>no, it’s not!<

>what the hell? there’s other people here, trapped in my word processor!<

>we’re not trapped we’re the same as you, we’ve got devices linked to the same thing!<

>that’s amazing! so what’s the point?<

>no idea! hey did you hear the pyjama boys have formed a unit to protect the gelf?<

>oi, who you calling pyjama boys? i’m a longjohns man meself!<

>lister’s here too?<

>everyone’s here it’s the internet dummy! but I’m not in rimmer’s crew anymore we had a falling out...<

>last night was a lazza, thanks alot dave<

>look guys don’t kill this gelf okay?<

>are you a soyboy?<

>what’s a soyboy?<

>what’s a soyboy? like rimmer – he’s been posting stuff about veganism, gelf rights, holophobic microaggressions all morning... who’s he teamed up with then?<

>mcintyre, that guy sam and the naked guy in the shower guy...<

>that’s it?! does anyone want any toast? lol<

>what does lol mean?<

>it’s internet parlance my grandfather taught it to me, means i’m laughing<

>’it’s stupid’, that means you’re stupid<

>lister, we’re having a training session – do you want to come with?<

>wait, kochanski’s saving the gelf too?<

>can’t think why *kochanski* would want to defend another species?<

>what’s that supposed to mean?<

>you know... your boyfriend, what is he supposed to be, a vampire, somekind of pleasure gelf?<

>have you been on the freaky fungus again, making up stories with your crypto-fascist paranoid mates?<

>mccauley saw him<

>your secret boyfriend. and his robot friend. starting to ring a little bell?<

>my private life is none of your business, or mccauley’s, or anyone else’s<

>it is if you defy hollister and the jgwu and join the gelf liberation league. You’re a political figure now<

>kochanski’s a fake kochanski, like the fake todhunter who released the gelf. they’re working for the deep dwarf. birdman saw this whole thing coming<

>birdman was frozen for stowing a sparrow<

>is that the same thing as budgie smuggling?<

>lol<

>stop saying that it’s so poney<

>oh yeah, what stasis booth is he frozen in then?<

>he isn’t he’s in a secret jail for telling the truth about the deep dwarf. these people have come from another dimension to take our jobs and our women<

>what jail?<

>there’s a secret jail on floor 13. and a karaoke bar on g deck, just ask bent bob...<

>so he never had a sparrow then?<

>the sparrow’s a red herring<

>so why’s he called birdman then?<

>because he’s in *jail* moron<

>shall we try and blackmail hollister?< tapped Dave privately to Kochanski.

>denis the donut boy? his approval ratings are through the observation dome. reckons no-one will believe it<

>figures. course the truth is more like no-one will care. just makes you feel bad for not calling it. also, it kind of humanises him to be honest. i mean, let him have his day in the sun y’know...<

>he’s from another dimension, *this* todhunter. my dimension detector app on my ismeg went off when I saw him earlier. maybe the begg’s from another dimension<

‘Can I have an extra four hours sleep and a double espresso please, Holly?’ requested McIntyre.

‘Sure thing, George,’ said Holly.

‘Ah if only life were that simple for the rest of us, eh Sam?’ said the naked shower guy. Sam laughed along jovially.

‘I’m having a hard time not looking at your penis,’ said Kochanski to the naked shower guy.

‘What’s the matter you got some kind of sexual problem, you alright to leave your cabin?’ he replied defensively.

‘Erm, I don’t think so.’ 

‘Where’s Lister?’ asked Brown. Rimmer suddenly looked the other way, and then wished he could look away on himself somehow, I mean disappear.

‘Mute point, what about Todhunter?’

‘Oh, he... slipped off... said he was getting reinforcements.’

‘Reinforcements?’ questioned Newton looking over her spectacles seriously ‘For a guy with no clothes, a guy with no body, a nun and a bunch of pen-pushers. You think we need it versus the Canaries, Frankenstein’s Monsters and the military police?’ 

‘Look we’ve got the element of surprise,’ said Sam, nodding his eyes at the naked shower guy.

‘That’s not enough,’ said Rimmer decisively. ‘We need to learn how to fight. At first I thought the internet would spread reason to the Dwarf but instead it’s poisoned the masses with crypto-fascist propaganda... those Canary guys are no singing group let me tell you, we’re not going to defeat them with memes and a whisk drive. Although D-d-don’t Shoot! is trending above Let’s get out there and twat it!... Anyway, the point is we need to get training for tonight!’

‘So that’s why we’re in the gym?’ said McIntyre. ‘You realise I have no actual body don’t you?’

‘Ditto,’ said Sam self-deprecatingly.

‘That’s nothing a sturdy holowhip can’t remedy,’ said Rimmer, passing the transhologrammatic object, happy to help the much maligned McIntyre. ‘You’re just smegged though,’ he said, burning Sam the wise guy. ‘So,’ he said, gesturing to the wrestling ring. Who wants to fight who first? How about......’ Just then the gym doors opened dramatically, revealing the silhouettes of Lister and Todhunter... ‘Lister and Todhunter!’ he blurted, stunned. 

That morning Lister and Rimmer had had a massive fight. Lister wanted to go to work. People were starting to see them as la-dee-da. They didn’t get out, and had some shady deal with the elites. They seemed... separate... and they seemed to like it that way. It was a bad look to be friends with Kochanski, who there was all kinds of zany rumours flying round the internet about - about her and her zany secret boyfriend who was alternately a vampire or a version of her cat turned humanoid by a robot from the future, based on drunken conspiracies attributed to the mysterious Birdman. 

Birdman was a hero of the cultish corridor gang Frankenstein’s Monsters, who was so called because the establishment claimed he was in stasis for stowing away a sparrow. But Frankenstein’s Monsters believed that it was because of something to do with a cat and his robot friend that Birdman was like supposed to be suppressing in this interdimensional chamber or something. Basically it was a conspiracy that lead them to all being replaced by GELFs and jettisoned into space. Also there were a lot of rumours about the ship being the wrong shape and in the wrong place and going in the wrong direction.

A-ny-way. Lister wanted to go to work and hang with the Monsters, charge up his street cred. And Rimmer was all fired up about defending the GELF. Thing about Lister, in this Universe was, he was conservative, he had found his Fiji, his Fuschal, in Red Dwarf. Lister knew how to handle the social chaos of 22nd Century Liverpool, but he was a deep guy, he wanted to settle down, and for that he didn’t need the strife of society and politics. He was like the cool guy in school who hung with the jocks, the nerds, the weirdos - he was nonpartisan, omnivorous. That’s how he wanted life to be, so he could focus on Rimmer. 

Lister was a chilled sex positive bisexual who just wanted to settle down on a tropical island with Krissie Kochanski. Now he was a chilled sex positive bisexual who just wanted to settle down in a space island with Arnold Rimmer. But Rimmer had gone through complete smeg coming out and wasn’t about to waste another second not fully fighting for himself and all the other marginalised weirdos with him.

Lister was wearing the scuffed badgey leather jacket Ace had thought he’d only ever worn after the accident in his own dimension. He just started wearing all leather a couple of years after the accident. Ace was a hardlight hologram, with Todhunter’s hard athletic body, and he faced Dave Lister, who knew how to brawl, who Ace, despite learning to respect him still found gross but now, smelling the bitter male sweat of danger, also weirdly intimidating...

‘Well?’ said Hippy Rimmer.

‘Aren’t you supposed to ring a bell or something?’ asked Newton, peering over her spectacles like she did with every single thing she ever said.

‘Er..’ Hippy Rimmer took out the pen he still always carried with him despite being a hippy, even though he wasn’t a hippy at all, and chimed Naked Guy in the Shower Guy’s metal pipe.

‘Do you flaming mind?’ said Naked Guy in the Shower Guy and Kochanski laughed. At his penis. And so missed what happened next, which was that Ace grabbed the chains that festooned Lister’s shoulders, and Lister belly kicked him somehow sending them both flying backwards in opposite directions.

‘Are you alright, Dave?’ said Todhunter’s blurry face, looking down at him as he groaned and tried to get anything out of his back except raw pain.

‘Am *I* alright? How comes you’re alright? *I* kicked *you* remembeh, it was like doing a parkour move off a brick wall. Smegging hell, you must be ripped!’ 

‘Talking of ripped,’ said Ace, a little too smoothly, Lister thought. A bit too much like a kind of James Bond character, he thought dreamily ‘I think I damaged your jacket...’

Lister nodded his head and then turned it to the sides where Todhunter had actually grabbed him. ‘Oh smeg, yeah, you broke the chain.’ Tears welled in Lister’s eyes. Oh no, what was the providence of that chain? It just looked like a cheap chain you keep your keys on, glue-gunned to his shoulder. But with Lister you never knew. His grandmother’s dog’s chain? With Lister, a little meant a lot, he was a massively sentimental guy with hardly any roots. What had he done?

‘He broke the chain, Rimmer!’ He kind of cried and laughed and said it all at the same time.

‘He broke the chain!’ said Hippy Rimmer, laughing. They both kept repeating the phrase ‘He broke the chain’ as Hippy Rimmer tried to help Lister up several times, each time both of them collapsing hysterically.

‘Right! Who’s next?’ said Newton, surveying those still able to stay on their feet.

‘Let’s stop before someone gets hurt!’ said Sister Garret.

‘This is dangerous,’ said Sam.

‘Alright, Sam versus the Naked Guy in the Shower Guy.’ Everyone looked at the Naked Guy in the Shower Guy.

‘My eyes are up here,’ he said.

‘Are they?’ said McIntyre. ‘Everyone else’s is looking at your penis, mate.’

Lister and Rimmer had given up trying to get up now and were just lying on top of each other repeating ‘He broke the chain’ in exhausted voices and occasionally breaking into fits again.

‘What’s so funny about “he broke the chain” you morons?’ asked Carol.

‘It’s not,’ said Ace, who’d recoiled into the shadows and been forgotten about. He left the gym in silence and everyone looked at each other mystified except Lister and Rimmer who looked at each other with fear.

‘Look, Harrison’s livestreaming from the Garbage Bay right now,’ said Kochanski. They crowded in to see on the impractically tiny screen of Kochanski’s ismeg, everyone careful not to brush Naked Guy in the Shower Guy’s penis and saw the convict troopers streaming into the Garbage Bay, several of Frankenstein’s Monsters balanced on some kind of giant skutter claw festooned in refuse gore. 

One of the Canaries was just screaming ‘Let’s kill sumfing!! Let’s kill sumfing!!’ so loud it was distorting the crumby sound. On the screen, Ackerman, the Chief Warden, had an easel with an illustration of a baby BEGG on it.

‘We better get down there pronto!’ said Kochanski.

‘But how?’ said Hippy Rimmer jumping to his feet leaving Dave dazed. ‘I thought they were supposed to be attacking tonight. We haven’t the time. Xpress Lifts have got the franchise for the Garbage Bay, it’ll take hours, they make all their money from showing you adverts as you drop like a brick through treacle.’

‘Don’t panic, Arn, I’ve got a short cut. But for some stupid reason we can only go four at a time.’

‘Where the smeg did you get that? That’s triple-classified!’ said Brown, shocked at the sight of the teleporter. 

‘Don’t worry about that, grab a node!’ She grabbed a node, and so did Newton and Sister Garret.

‘Sorry I’m late!’ came a voice from a silhouette in the gym doors just as Kochanski was about to squeeze the node.

‘Bent Bob!’ said Kochanski as he approached.

‘I got these boss hazmat suits from supplies.’ The women put them on and beamed out.

‘Where the smeg did she get a teleporter from? Is it true what they say about her?’

‘Why what do they say about her?’ said Kochanski, appearing right by Bob and making him jump.

‘You know, just that...’

‘Grab a node, come on boys.’ Lister and Rimmer joined them, their hazmats half on, and they all popped off.

‘Wait!’ said Naked Guy in the Shower Guy. He was lying prone on the floor as Sam savagely beat him over and over with a soap on a rope. ‘WAIT!’ said Naked Guy in the Shower Guy. Sam finally relented, breathless and sweaty. ‘Where’s everybody gone?’ His voice echoed round the gym. 

Kochanski rematerialized. ‘Grab a node,’ she said ‘not *that* node, Sam.’

Thanks to Dwarfleaks, the Garbage Bay was the hot ticket on board that night, seemingly the whole crew entering into this macabre fascination. ‘Human supremist scum,’ muttered Rimmer. Spotlights illuminated the dripping gakky crane.

‘Get down from the crane,’ said Hollister through a tinny tannoy. ‘The crane is a big health and safety issue. Please get down from the crane. It’s hard to see why you’d even want to *be* there. You’re holding up the operation. The crane has nothing to do with this. We’re not even sure how it even got here.’

>yo tods where you at?<

>just getting reinforcements<

Lister gripped the device anxiously. The Canaries were inching forward towards the rubbish heap. Kill Crazy was going killcrazy, he just wanted to kill something like crazy. All the time. He was having a great day. ‘KILLLLLLLL! KILLLLLLL!’ They were on a gantry hiding behind a JGWU banner. Unions always had banners.

>whatever<

>don’t whatever me<

>what’s wrong?<

A seismic and pungent burp bubbled from the centre of the heap, condensing on everyone’s faces. 

‘Hold your fire!’ shouted Ackerman.

‘How come we don’t have proper equipment like hazmat suits?’ asked Baxter.

>stuff. remember when i asked you yesterday about if you thought decisions you make can affect your sexuality?<

>nope.<

>well i did and i want to know your answer<

‘Please alite from the crane. The crane is rusty and goes nowhere. Leave the crane now.’ The last stragglers were dismounting the crane when another belch, nearer the gantry where GELF defenders hid, emanated from the swamp of putrid chicken soup, crunchy bar wrappers, slag, gak, gunk, scrap, battery acid, old shopping trolleys, skutterparts, an inflatable tie rack, bunk beds, broken glass, and so on.

‘Hold your fire!’ screamed Ackerman.

The spotlights settled on the swamp of detritus.

>tods, we need you guy they’re gonna kill this begg dude<

Frankenstein’s monsters were behind the Canaries, cheering them on. ‘KILLLLLL! KILLLLLLLL!’ chanted McGruder.

‘Can’t you think of a better chant than that?’ shouted Hippy Rimmer, entering the spotlight. He’d clambered down from the gantry and climbed across the heap.

‘It rhymes!’ shouted McGruder.

‘So does, so does....’ He couldn’t think of anything. An empty lager can hit him on the head. A spotlight flitted up revealing Chen still hiding in the crane.

‘Don’t be a commy Rimmer. Better smeg than red, aye!’

‘Now that *doesn’t* rhyme.’ Suddenly the BEGG erupted magisterially from the swamp, grabbing Rimmer from behind.

‘Rimmer!’ shouted Lister, diving for Rimmer and sinking like a stone in the tripe and grime. The crane collapsed and Chen landed on the GELF’s head. Rimmer climbed onto the crane, grabbing Lister’s hand and heaving him out of the oily pocket of sludge he was getting sucked into.

‘I killed it!’ shouted Chen victoriously. Free Birdman!’ Frankenstein’s monsters cheered from behind the Canaries. Baxter and Kill Crazy glared back angrily, pre-empted.

‘There’s no need for that!’ said Ace, abseiling down from the shadows. With Birdman.

‘Birdman!’ the monsters shouted, they whooped and danced. 

‘D-d-don’t shoot!’ said Birdman through a loud haler. ‘The GELF is innocent. I love nonhuman lifeforms. I’m an ornithologist. Hollister’s working with the Deep Dwarf. They want to replace you all with androids. Humans are too political, too social, too difficult, don’t you see? They’re setting you up!’

‘Arrest them all!’ tannoyed Hollister. The Canaries surged forward. 

‘Rimmer!’ shouted Kochanski, and threw him the teleporter. Rimmer and Lister, Chen and Birdman grabbed a node and beamed off.

‘Where’d they go?’ said Baxter before Lister’s arms appeared from behind him grabbing his weapon from him. Rimmer disarmed Kill Crazy and the rest of the Monsters disarmed the rest of the Canaries. The Canaries were quite pliant and soft and dopey, hardly the hardened killing machines they were hyped as. Just then the BEGG appeared and roared battery acid phlegm into Baxter’s face.

‘Snuffles!’ shouted Ace. The BEGG turned and recognised him. Ace approached and embraced the GELF and the room was still, the GELF breathing easy in his arms. The Monsters, JGWU, Hollister and GELF lib began to mill around and file out, spellbound. The BEGG and Ace said their goodbye, which consisted of silently respectfully nodding at each other before the GELF submerged itself back into the detritus.

‘How did you bust Birdman out of jail?’ asked Rimmer. 

Ace shrugged. ‘Because I’m Ace,’ said Ace.

‘Try telling that to Kochanski’s Bunkmate and Bent Bob.’

‘Not Asexual, Ace Rimmer, I’m the you who became Ace.’ The three of them hugged. It was the spliff ends in their quarters that made him realise Hippy Rimmer was a hologram. They’d been smoking holospliffs, that’s why he could get high. Then these anomalies in the ship design. This wasn’t the same Red Dwarf he’d left. The last thing Lister had said to him before he left his home dimension was actually ‘smeghead’, but Ace always remembered Lister softly asking ‘Are you really gonna be the one who breaks the chain?’

‘How did you reincarnate Red Dwarf?

‘Nanobots,’ said Lister.

‘Naturally,’ said Ace

‘Parrots?’ said Hippy Rimmer.

‘Yeah, we stink, times like this I envy that Naked Guy in the Shower Guy...’

In the shady corner of Parrots, Lister finally warmed to the subject Ace had been pushing him on. ‘Lesbian feminists thought you could in the late 20th century. But it’s like Popeye said y’know, I am what I am, so say you make a decision and it makes you the person you are... maybe you were always gonna be that person but you still needed to make that decision to kind of have been that person all along like. I mean, maybe you can make a decision that affects who you are in the past. Maybe you have to make that decision. I mean like, once, right, I went into a wine bar... and the thing is did I *choose* to go into that wine bar or did I later just *decide* I decided, I mean...’

‘Lister...’ said Ace.

‘Yeah?’

‘Shutup.’ 

Hippy Rimmer smooshed Lister’s hat over his eyes. ‘Who turned out the lights?’ said Lister doing a dopey zombie like mime which led to his can of Leopard Lager to decant itself onto the brogues of a certain Lucas McClaren.

‘Oops, sorry fella,’ said Lister beseechingly.

‘No, no, don’t worry, absolutely, not at all, absolutely not...’ said McClaren, trying to absorb the lager with a napkin. ‘Actually if I may, it rather affords me the opportunity to cut into your conversation. I just wanted to say, maybe sexuality is like the old Schrodinger’s Cat? The quantum experiment which breaks down the subjective/objective divide. Maybe until some decision is made you both are and aren’t gay at the same time. I mean that’s what you’re worried about isn’t it? Todhunter?’

But ‘Todhunter’ had drifted off, absentmindedly staring into the blurry abstract expressionisms of a spoon-surface he twirled casually in his hand. For a second, he thought he saw Cat, so much so he turned to see Kochanksi brush the hat stand on her way out and wasn’t that... Thornton?

**Author's Note:**

> Kochanski's Pride Prejudice insight taken from Zizek


End file.
